curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Mitch Jackson:
Congress banned armed federal agents from the polls 161 years ago.
A Tuesday Morning in November
You pull into the parking lot of the elementary school where you have voted for twenty years, you grab your coffee, you walk toward the door with your sample ballot folded in your back pocket, and you see two black SUVs with no plates parked by the entrance and a man in a vest with three letters on the back standing beside them. Your stomach drops. You slow down. You check your phone for a reason to stay in the car. The woman in front of you turns around and walks back to her car.
That is the whole play. Nobody has to arrest a single voter. Fear does the work.
…
The Law Has Been Clear Since 1865
A polling place is the one room in America where the government has to wait outside.
Congress wrote this rule in the middle of the Civil War, and it has stayed on the books for 161 years because every generation since understood the danger. Federal law makes it a crime for any officer of the military, or any person in the civil service of the United States, to order, bring, keep, or control troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held. The only exception covers force needed to repel armed enemies of the United States. Break that law and you face up to five years in prison and a permanent ban from holding federal office.
Read those words again. Armed men in the civil service of the United States. That is ICE.
In 1909 Congress went back and removed a second exception that had allowed troops to “keep the peace at the polls.” Lawmakers deleted it because they understood that a president who wants soldiers at the ballot box will always find a disturbance to point at. They closed the loophole on purpose, and it has stayed closed for 117 years.
…
- What They Have Said Out Loud …
- It Already Happened Twice …
- Your Rights as a Citizen at the Polls …
- If You Are Undocumented and Standing Near a Polling Place
You do not have the right to vote in a federal election, and you must never try. …You do have the right to be near a polling place. Driving your citizen daughter to vote is legal. Waiting in the car is legal. Standing beside your wife in line is legal. Walking your father with the bad knee to the door is legal, and in most states you are allowed to go inside as an assistant if he needs help reading or marking the ballot, subject to your state’s rules on who qualifies. In California a voter is allowed to bring up to two people into the booth to help, and the only people barred from that role are the voter’s employer and the voter’s union representative. The Constitution protects you on that sidewalk exactly as it protects the citizen next to you. The Fourth Amendment does not check papers.
… - Police, Sheriffs, the Guard, and the Military …
- In the Moment …
- Vote Before They Get the Chance
…
The Closing Argument
Every fear tactic depends on the target not knowing the rules, and now you know them. An armed federal agent at a polling place is committing a crime that Congress named in 1865 and sharpened in 1909. A federalized soldier at a polling place is committing that same crime. A president who invokes an emergency to put them there will lose in court, the way he lost in Chicago.
A citizen who stands in line, says four sentences, films from a distance, and calls the hotline has done the real work of protecting this democracy, and a citizen who votes early, checks the registration, brings four people, and saves the hotline number in every phone in the house has already beaten the whole scheme before the first SUV ever pulls into the lot.
The room where you vote is the one room where the government waits outside, and on November 3 you are going to walk into it.
(Mitch Jackson more…)
Chris Geidner:
Dueling rulings cause chaos over Missouri maps
Jennifer Rubin:
What if the law means what it says?
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James Eagle:
China overtakes America across ten democracies
(James Eagle more…)
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Kyle Stock, Kyle Kim, Saritha Rai, Danny Lee, Nayla Razzouk @ Bloomberg:
Wildfires and Extreme Rain Are Filling Up US Reservoirs with DirtClimate change is making water storage more precious — and less reliable.
The federal government finally stepped in to referee the Colorado River earlier this summer, cooling one of the most pitched battles in the war for water rights that has engulfed much of the American West.
Arizona, California and Nevada will have to reduce the amount of water they take from the river by about one-quarter for the next two years. The goal is to let reservoirs along the Colorado fill up in the midst of a prolonged drought and one of the lowest snowpacks on record.
But while the top of the lakes may rise again, an arguably bigger problem is lurking at the bottom, and the government is doing little about it. A steady buildup of sediment – sand and silt and mud – is shrinking the nation’s water storage capacity precisely when we need it most.
(Kyle Stock, Kyle Kim, Saritha Rai, Danny Lee, Nayla Razzouk @ Bloomberg more…)The insurance industry’s response to climate change is the most honest financial accounting of the climate crisis available
Niharika Mandhana, Krishna Pokharel, Tripti Lahiri @ WSJ:
Nepal’s Big Bet on Hydropower Miscalculated One Thing—Monster FloodsThe country has hundreds of projects in development, but those plans are now threatened by growing instability in the Himalayas
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Ken Klippenstein:
U.S. Finds A War It’s Willing to DeclareNew government logo chooses violence
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Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – September 8, 2026On Sunday, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The AfD is anti-immigrant and pro-Russia and has won the support of both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk.
When Musk posted “Well done!” in German to the co-founder of AfD, Alice Weidel, another AfD leader responded with thanks …
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Liz Oyer:
Trump’s Secret PardonsThe money and influence-peddling surrounding Trump’s second-term pardons have been much discussed. But less attention has been paid to another alarming feature: the secrecy.
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Joseph Cox @ 404 Media:
A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over404 Media is revealing the name of Border Patrol’s predictive policing units, which analyze financial data and have local cops pull people over. The people are not suspected of any particular crime.
(Joseph Cox @ 404 Media more…)
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Laerke Christensen @ Snopes:
The U.S. is bound by a U.N. treaty that says countries can’t “claim” celestial bodies like the moon for themselves.
Last Days in Two Nations
Climate.us
formerly Climate.gov
Climate Solutions Explorer
Have I Been Flocked?
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- August 31: Pierre Damas Bel
- August 1: Edwin Lopez-Cornejo
- July 19: Jose Chajon-Raxon
- July 14: Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran
- July 13: Joan Sebastian Guerrero
- July 7: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
- June 4: Mamuka Artmeladze
- April 16: Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt
- March 25: Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
April 1 – Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz @ AP: Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide - January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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